There are several ways to present a three-dimensional image to a viewer of a television. The common aspect of the existing methods is to present an image or frame from two perspectives, a left-eye perspective of the content to the left eye and present an image or frame from a right-eye perspective to the right eye. This creates the proper parallax so that the viewer sees both perspectives and interprets what they are seeing as three-dimensional.
Early three-dimensional content was captured using two separate cameras aimed at the subject but slightly separate from each other providing two different perspectives. This simulates what the left eye and right eye see. The cameras simultaneously exposed two films. Using three-dimensional eyewear, the viewer looks through one film with the left eye and the other film with the right eye, thereby seeing what looks like a three-dimensional image.
Progressing to motion pictures, three-dimensional movies were produced in a similar way with two cameras, but the resulting images were color encoded into the final film. To watch the film in three-dimension, eyewear with colored filters in either eye separate the appropriate images by canceling out the filter color. This process is capable of presenting a three-dimensional movie simultaneously to a large audience, but has marginal quality and, because several colors are filtered from the content, results in poor color quality, similar to a black and white movie.
More recently, personal eyewear have been made that have two separate miniature displays, one for each eye. In such, left content is presented on the display viewed by the left eye and right content is presented on the display viewed by the right eye. Such systems work well, but require a complete display system for each viewer.
Similar to this, Eclipse methods uses a common display, such as a television, along with personal eyewear that have fast-response shutters over each eye. In such, the left eye shutter is open allowing light to pass, the right eye shutter is closed blocking light and the television displays left-eye content, therefore permitting the light (image) from the television to reach the left eye. This is alternated with closing of the left eye shutter, opening of the right eye shutter and displaying right-eye content the television. By alternating faster than the typical human response time, the display appears continuous and flicker-free.
One problem with the latter two methods is that the three-dimensional content must be encoded on, for example, a disk and decoded by a player that switches between left/right eye content in synchronization with the left-eye and right-eye shutter. With such, one cannot connect an industry standard player (e.g. BlueRay or DVD) to an industry standard television (e.g., Plasma or LCD television) and watch three-dimensional content with a set of three-dimensional eyewear. Another problem is in synchronizing the eyewear with the images displayed on the television. Currently, the three-dimensional eyewear needs to be connected to the television by a low-latency connection, usually a wired connection to assure the proper eyewear shutter is open when the corresponding image is displayed (the image that relates to the eye associated with the open shutter). Although wireless transmission techniques such as WiFi and Bluetooth are well-known, low-cost and readily available, latency is of concern for transmitting a synchronization signal. For example, if at t0, the television displays a left-eye frame and at the same time transmits a Bluetooth packet to eyewear, the eyewear doesn't know the packet has arrived until t0+1, where 1 is the latency of the transmission. The latency, in an ideal transmission, is equal to the packet size divided by the transmission speed. For high-speed transmission such as 54 Mbs 802.11, the latency is normally rather low, but the latency is often increased due to other wireless devices utilizing the same bandwidth, transmission errors, noise and interference (e.g. interference from a microwave oven, etc). Therefore, the latency ranges from microseconds to many milliseconds. In such a transmission system, when synchronization is skewed due to unpredictable latency, the wrong eye shutter is open for too long, allowing each eye to partially see content/frames designated for the other eye; causing blurring or other artifacts that detract from the three-dimensional viewing experience.
What is needed is a three-dimensional presentation system that utilizes existing packet wireless transmission techniques.